When: The lecture is at 5 p.m. Feb. 6 followed by a reception from 6 to 7:30 p.m. Klett's photographs will be on display through Feb. 14. Gallery hours are 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday to Thursday, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Friday, and by appointment, 677-2989.

Best known for his images of the American West, photographer Mark Klett will be trying something new during his exhibit at Bradley University's Heuser Art Gallery.

Half the exhibit will be images of the Grand Canyon, but the other half will be devoted to a series of photos Klett is calling "The Map of One Year." Digitally rendered, each image comes from something that caught Klett's attention during his day-to-day life in 2012. The work addresses, in part, the passage of time, a major theme permeating Klett's work since his career began in the late 1970s.

Klett is Regents Professor at the Herberger Institute of Arizona State University and the author of numerous photography books. He is this year's special guest for The Bunn Lectureship in Photography at Bradley University. His images will be displayed at Heuser through Feb. 14, and he will speak at 5 p.m. Thursday at Horowitz Auditorium in the Caterpillar Global Communications Center.

"Photography is just this great medium perfectly suited to asking questions about time," said Klett during a telephone interview Monday from his home in Tempe, Ariz. "All my work has to do with asking some kind of question about time."

Klett began his career in 1977 with the "Rephotographic Survey Project." He joined forces with two other photographers to rephotograph sites in the American West that were photographed in the 1860s and 1870s as part of four major land surveys.

"It was the first time anybody had done rephotography," said Klett. "We photographed the same place, from the same vantage point, with the same lighting as the original image. It had never been done in the fine art category before. We kind of brought it into that community."

When Klett began the project, he had just finished his master's in fine art at State University of New York at

Buffalo. Klett had gotten interested in photography a few years earlier while working on his bachelor's degree in geology at St. Lawrence University in New York.

"There was kind of an informal group of us who were pretty seriously interested in photography," said Klett. "It was a lot of the geologists for some strange reason — guys who were into the technical aspect of it."

Klett had recently inherited a large view camera from an uncle, and members of the group pooled funds to bring in experts to teach them photographic processes.

Over the years Klett has mastered a number of different processes, from daguerreotype to digital.

"Process-wise, photography comes easy to me," said Klett. "Maybe it's my science background, but it's always been kind of easy for me to pick up stuff."

The transition to digital was something Klett embraced. He admires how beautifully and efficiently color is rendered digitally — he recalls the early days of color and how he labored to process film and paper by hand. Klett's new series, "The Map of One Year," takes advantage of the ease of digital — created with inexpensive paper and a computer printer, the exhibit presents a new, hands-on way of viewing a photographic essay.

Page 2 of 3 - "All my career I've been producing prints that are meant to be clean and displayed up on the wall," said Klett. "This is something that's meant to be a little different."

Klett printed 120 images on a long roll of paper which will be hung on the gallery wall. A larger version of each image is also printed on a single sheet of paper, which is folded like a map. Viewers can unfold each image onto a table in the middle of the gallery.

"I used to carry maps around in the field, and the images look like maps — they have the same weight and feel," said Klett. "When you open the picture up you see the picture, and I've also written on the picture — the date and something more revealing, so you get an idea of the content."

Each of the images were made in 2012, the year Klett turned 60. It was also the year his brother was diagnosed with cancer.

"I wanted the display to be really informal. It's meant to be more like a diary, with a map-like image spread on the table," said Klett. "What's on the wall will put them in order, kind of a key to the map."

Klett created the project, in part, to teach his students about visual themes.

"People keep diaries — this is kind of a visual diary . . . again, it's about time," said Klett.

It's a very personal project for Klett, with images of family, students, and home, but the themes are universal and complement the other portion of Klett's display at Heuser — "Reconstructing the View: The Grand Canyon." Produced over the course of five years in collaboration with artist Byron Wolfe, "Reconstructing the View" combines old photographs and artwork of the Grand Canyon with modern images produced by Klett and Wolfe.

"People who have never seen the Grand Canyon know something about it because they've seen pictures," said Klett. Presenting different images taken for different purposes during different eras of the same location gives the place new perspective, said Klett.

"It kind of decodes the way we've kind of inherited this view of the place," he said. "To look at it and take it apart by contrasting all these viewpoints is a way of subverting the individual way of seeing it. It's kind of an exciting idea."

Klett and Wolfe used images from many sources — fine art photographers Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Frederick Sommer; drawings and paintings by topographical artist William Holmes; and even images by anonymous artists, including stereoscopic cards from the early 20th century and postcards from the 1920s and 1930s.

Rephotographing opens a new view on an image from the past in the same way that written history gets a new wrinkle when new facts and tales from the past are uncovered.

Page 3 of 3 - "In the end, it kind of questions the past, and you form a new idea about it," said Klett. "Changing the way you look at the past can change the way you view the present, and that can ultimately change the way you view the future."

Leslie Renken can be reached at 686-3250 or lrenken@pjstar.com. Follow her on Twitter, @LeslieRenken, and subscribe to her on Facebook.com/leslie.renken.